It is a step toward reduced complexity that many United States
military analysts - both in and outside the government - have been
mulling over for years. Greatly reduced geopolitical tensions
finally made it happen; now, by the turn of the century, superpower
strategic nuclear stockpiles will be less than one-third their size
of a only a few years ago.

"This will be seen as an enormous move forward," said President
Bush at the Rose Garden ceremony announcing the agreement. "Who
knows what lies out there ahead?"

Besides a numerical range limit of 3,000 to 3,500 warheads for
each nation, the new pact's key feature is its restrictions on
multiple-warhead missiles. Fast, accurate, dangerous, these weapons
have long lain at the heart of nuclear-war fighting plans. They are
both threatening and vulnerable, because they are high-priority
targets.

In the end, the Russians accepted a US position eliminating all
land-based, multi-warhead missiles. In return, they wangled both
lower overall warhead limits than the US had proposed, and a
greater reduction in the Pentagon's cherished submarine-carried,
multi-warhead missile force - one-half, instead of the one-third
the US had offered.

"We're talking about dramatic reductions," says Lee Feinstein,
director of research at the private Arms Control Association.

For the first time, Mr. Feinstein says, the US appears to be
moving in the direction of a "minimum deterrent." By this he means
a nuclear force capable of riding out a first-strike attack and
surviving with enough weapons to launch a retaliatory strike of its
own against the fabric of the aggressor nation.

The current US and Russian nuclear forces are built around
theories far more complicated than that. They're designed to be
able to attack all the other nation's nuclear weapons and military
command structure - in short, to fight a war, and win it if
possible. This kind of planning necessitates many more nuclear
weapons, and more accurate ones, than simple deterrence.

Military planners adopted the "counterforce" strategy at least
in part because they were uneasy with the idea of pointing their
weapons at the obvious targets: cities. But millions of civilians
would perish in any kind of nuclear exchange, and "counterforce"
thinking helped fuel the "we-have-to-match-the-other-guy" thinking
that drove the arms race for so many years.

At a 1988 conference at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a
group of nuclear scientists and planners concluded that the US and
the then-Soviets would begin to travel down this road.

"Nuclear weapons strategy is likely to move toward a
`deterrence-only' policy that will place less emphasis on
counterforce targeting," concluded the conference's final report. …